GF8800 demos released

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SlmDnk

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Well at least 3 of them: http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_downloads_nvidia.html

http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_adrianne_home.html
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_froggy_home.html
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzone_boxofsmoke_downloads.html

Smoke demo looks very nice with my GF7950, too bad the water is buggy. Adrianne and Froggy didn't work :|

There's also a new fluid video on Keenan's site: http://graphics.cs.uiuc.edu/svn/kcrane/web/video/blood.avi

Tip for those having performance problems: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=1112215&postcount=101

I was having problems with this demo running in the 8-10fps range as well and in order to fix it, I set the affinity to 0 rather than 1 and 0. Seems to be a threading problem. As soon as I did that the framerate tripled.
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The blood video doesn't look like blood so much as it looks like red paint, but still very impressive.

It looks like those demos are blocked from running on previous hardware.
 
Bahh, they`re OpenGL with NV`s proprietary extensions...I would`ve been curious as to how they do on the X1900...mmm, wrapper time:))
 
Graham said:
And by god the uncanny valley just exploded
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What do you mean by that? If you're saying she looks real then I'd have to disagree. While her face looks great, her body looks... weird, not sure why. Doesn't seem like they have any subsurface scattering going on, so that could be it.

By the way, I'm new so hi everyone. :smile:
 
Graham said:
Very impressive skin shading... But her eyes are dead.
And by god the uncanny valley just exploded
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Uncanny Valley is going to be a problem that's going to be increasingly causing headaches for artists and game developers as they try to create more realistic looking people. IMO, the smart artists will try to create great looking models but still keep to the left of the valley (and keeping the models looking computer generated) rather than trying get get things to look completely realistic and fall flat bang in the middle of the uncanny valley. I can't help but think of MGS4, the characters don't look completely realistic, but they still look great and keeping left of the valley.
 
IMO, mid-term, the best bet is to get the environments to the right of the valley and the characters to the left of it. Another possibility to achieve that goal is to keep the characters slightly non-realistic on purpose, which should defeat the problem if done properly, I think.

And if you do want to go to the right of the valley, it might be a good idea to do so with styles and materials that are easier to simulate. A good example of that is arguably ATI's Ruby (although I'd say it's not at the right of the valley, but that's another thing) - the hair style was selected on purpose because it's cheaper to implement than, say, long hair, or even curly hair styles. Had they selected something more complicated, given the polygon and shading budgets involved, it'd have made the entire composition unrealistic because of the widely varying quality of the two elements.

You could argue the same would happen if the characters were noticeably inferior to the environment. I think that's true, which is why it's key to keep them slightly unrealistic, or perhaps "over-the-top" on purpose if your game's theme permits it. It'll be interesting to see how artists and game developers in general deal with this, definitely... :) I wouldn't be surprised if that'll be what diferentiates the "good" studios from the "very, damn fricking good" ones in a few years.


Uttar
 
The uncanny valley syndrome is kicking in only when the animation of the character is bad, AKA robotic. When you have a very complex character, with advance skin shaders and realistic materials, the dead fish look on their face is just sticking out like a sore thumb.
The solution to alleviate this is simply to give the models personalities, not by modeling them differently, but by animating them correctly.

When we look to something that ressemble a human, we automatically expect it to behave like one, thus expressing emotions which are visually transmited by expressions and movements. And that's what a lot of CGI models lack, good and more importantly subtle facial expressions.
Uttar said:
A good example of that is arguably ATI's Ruby (although I'd say it's not at the right of the valley, but that's another thing)
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Ruby is not even close to be at the realistic,I don't know why you come up with that example.
Ruby is just a demonstration of bad artâ„¢ combined with a lot of calculation power, nothing else.
 
Why is the aliasing on the case in "smoke" so terrible? It's ignoring my control panel settings to ask for 8xQ.
 
I'm running 97.44 on my 8800GTX with an X2 4200@2640, and getting some pretty odd results. Display is a 2405FPW, at 1920x1200 (tho Smoke is in a window and nowhere near that res).

First, there is the aliasing issue on the gold frame of the case in the smoke demo. It's terrible, and is ignoring my CP settings so far as I can tell.

Second, the Adrianne demo looked choppy, so I turned on FRAPS. 5fps. Wtf? Turned down AA. Still 5fps. Turned off AA and AF entirely. Still 5fps. Looked at Task Manager, CPU usage roughly 30%.

Froggy (which, btw, first reaction was "Nice!") is FRAPsing in the 10-16fps range. None of this is dual-core aware, so far as my Task Manager seems to think.

So I'm scratching my head pretty seriously here. I know one other person is seeing the aliasing issue on the gold case in smoke. How about any of these other issues?

And while I'm here, what's this "Supersample multiplier" thingy in the config for Adrianne and Froggy?

Edit: Tried some lower res for Adrianne. Still 5fps. So somethings funky somewhere.
 
geo said:
Edit: Tried some lower res for Adrianne. Still 5fps. So somethings funky somewhere.
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Just taking a wild shot, but do you have dual monitors? I seem to remember having a similar issue with the 6800 demos and I think changing the hardware acceleration in the control panel to "Single display performance mode" took care of it. I doubt it's the problem here, but I figured I'd put it out there...
 
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Lezmaka said:
Just taking a wild shot, but do you have dual monitors? I seem to remember having a similar issue with the 6800 demos and I think changing the hardware acceleration in the control panel to "Single display performance mode" took care of it. I doubt it's the problem here, but I figured I'd put it out there...
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Yes I had the exact same problem with the Luna demo on my GTS. And since these demo's are OpenGL based then the same definatly would apply here. Good call!

If you have dual displays Geo this is probably the cause.
 
Lezmaka said:
Just taking a wild shot, but do you have dual monitors? I seem to remember having a similar issue with the 6800 demos and I think changing the hardware acceleration in the control panel to "Single display performance mode" took care of it. I doubt it's the problem here, but I figured I'd put it out there...
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You, sir, get a cookie! (well, pos rep anyway). That was indeed the culprit. . . . Frame rates into the 20s and 30s with Single display performance mode selected.
 
Smoke demo looks very nice and runnig with GeForce 7 series,but Adrianne and Froggy didn't work with GeForce 7 series (only with 8) :cry:. . .
 
Where can I find these in a video(with FPS)? For all of us who don't have the 8800.

Adrianne Demo
Froggy Demo
Box of Smoke Demo

Thanks. :)
 
If someone is interested here is some info how those demos run. Im running on default 8800GTS (1280x1024 4xAA/16xAF HQ from cp), A64 X2 @ 2.3GHz and default SS multiplier.
- Froggy runs around 10-20fps, depends on angle.
- Adrianne is most of time 19fps sometimes when camera goes close to her face fps drops to 15.
- Smoke runs all the time 38fps.
 
Can someone out there PLEASE screen capture some images of addrianes hair / head close up, both in wireframe and solid rendering?

(does a wire frame mode exist?)

Also can anyone confirm the geometry polygon count of her?

Just some points of interest for me.

Thanks in advance.
 
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